Children’s Commissioner reports the government’s approach to youth violence

Article summary

The Children’s Commissioner has published a report of the public health response to youth violence in England. The government has pledged to use a public health approach to gang violence which involves all agencies collaborating together to tackle the ‘underlying causes of child criminal exploitation’. The Commissioner has recognised that ‘insufficient attention has been paid to the need for agencies in other area to adopt both safeguarding and public health response across the country’. Therefore, the implementation of action taken by public health bodies and children’s services has had limited work in incentivising and monitoring. The report outlines that a lot of local authorities do not have a ‘sufficient grip on the drivers for youth violence’ nor ‘a cogent strategy to reduce risk factors in vulnerable cohorts’. Risks such as local school exclusions were not being monitored. The Commissioner is particularly concerned by this as they understand ‘more about the ever–evolving models that gangs use to exploit children’....